Customer engagement has become a prominent issue in hospitality and tourism industry. However, customer engagement, is not easily defined or uniformly measured because a number of diverse factors must be considered. While meeting planners are important customers to CVBs, their engagement with CVBs has rarely been studied. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop and test a model of meeting planners’ engagement in CVBs empirically. Survey data were collected from a variety of meeting planners, which resulted in 305 usable responses for data analysis. Two step analyses (measurement model and structural model) were implemented. In addition, the moderating effect of reputation and familiarity were examined among the paths of the constructs. The results showed that the hypotheses were supported while familiarity has less salient impact than reputation on customer engagement in the event industry.

Using social network analysis, the current study examines the image of a unique festival in a well-established tourist destination on the East coast of the United State of America, the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina. Social Network Analysis (SNA) emphasizes the importance of constructing interconnectedness among concepts and knowledge networks in respondents’ minds (Hanneman & Riddle, 2011; Scott & Carrington, 2011). The technique visualizes complicated perception of tourists in a most simple but scientific way. Using concept maps and degree centralities derived from social network analysis as well as dendrograms, this study provides insights on wine and food festival in Myrtle Beach Area. Together with cluster analysis, the SNA suggests unique contributions to the understanding of tourist behaviour in tourism destination research.